Michael Mlekoday lives near the Salish Sea, teaching classes on hip-hop, Gothic literature, and wilderness poetics. A National Poetry Slam Champion, Mlekoday co-founded Button Publishing and is developing a new publishing project called The Lichening (coming soon!).
Mlekoday’s first book, The Dead Eat Everything, was chosen by Dorianne Laux as winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Their second book, All Earthly Bodies, was chosen by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. Their work has won the Florida Review Editors’ Prize, the AWP Intro Journals Award, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason scholarship from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference.
Mlekoday descends from the West Slavic tribes of Central Europe and was born on the banks of the Mississippi River — in lands the Dakota people and their ancestors have called home for thousands of years. They currently live in the homelands of the Coast Salish peoples.
Mlekoday’s work has been anthologized in The BreakBeat Poets, Read: America(s), and New Poetry of the Midwest, and has been translated into Polish. Recent poems appear in Third Coast, The Southampton Review, Sonora Review, Ninth Letter, Hunger Mountain, and The Rumpus. Mlekoday holds degrees from too many institutions: the University of Minnesota, Kansas State University, Indiana University, and most recently a PhD from the University of California, Davis.
Mlekoday curates a weekly newsletter of cool poems, which you can subscribe to below: